Sunday, August 2, 2009

Suppose you wake up to some extent and sometimes are able to act from presence and not from habitual mind patterns. However, your family, workmates and friends are deeply trapped in rigid, fixed ideas about life. They know exactly how you should live your life, how you should dress and behave, how children must be raised and how work should be carried out. You realize that you have to adjust or you have to leave.

If you can’t leave because you have children you care for and you can’t take them with you, then you have to adjust and make the best you can of the situation.

Many Muslim girls and women suffer enormously, trapped in horrible medieval belief systems. Millions of low-cast Hindus suffer trapped in the primeval Indian cast system. In fact, all religious beliefs are nothing but prisons. Religion has absolutely nothing to do with ethics and morals.

However, people with modern secular and liberal ideas are also trapped in mental torture chambers. We have to work like slaves to support our and our children’s endless craving for electronic toys. Girls and women are unsatisfied with themselves and others because they don’t look like the top models and the top models look like if they are captives in a Nazi prison camp. And men are dissatisfied with themselves and others because they are complete failures compared to Becham, Tom Cruise or Bob Dylan.

“Depression is now ten times as prevalent as it was in 1960... How is this epidemic to be explained?” I read this in Martin Seligman’s book, “Authentic Happiness“. A ten time’s increase means an increase with 1000%. Isn’t this an amazing fact?

So how do we escape from our mental prisons? It is extremely difficult because it is our fellow prisoners who are our jailers. It seems hopeless! It seems hopeless but it is not. There is a way out. It is possible to wake up and abandon old ways of thinking even if people around you don't. You don't have to tell your jailers that you have abandoned their belief system and that you don't intend to create a new one. You can pretend that you are one of them. You can dress like them and talk like them and act like them but you don’t have to be one of them. Soon you will find that there are many other prisoners/wardens who have had enough. You will find that there is an huge underground movement growing here on earth who no longer believe in belief systems; people who no longer believe in Communism, Liberalism, Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, nothing. You will find them everywhere, in workplaces, in school, in the Middle East, in India, in Europe, in Africa...